Thanks for circling back, it’s an important point. I can agree in principle that whether someone should teach yoga should be based on the breadth and depth of their knowledge of the subject and that their race or ethnicity isn’t the most important consideration. The problem is that teaching yoga doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are reasons why people who look like you and me have access to yoga teacher trainings, to travel abroad, and to the time and energy required to dive deeply into yogic texts and practices. There are reasons why we are often ironically considered more credible as teachers than people who actually grew up in the tradition and have South Asian ancestry. It’s wonderful if as white people we can dive deeply into the teachings and become “very qualified” to teach yoga in some objective sense. But in the real world of colonialism and racism and oppression, the ability to become yoga teachers as white people is not accidental or just lucky. It is a reflection of our privilege, and we must be willing to look at who is being harmed by that privilege.
I remember learning in yoga teacher training that if I ever went to India and told people that I taught yoga, they would imagine something very different in their heads than me guiding people through sun salutations on plastic yoga mats. Instead they would imagine me spending long stretches in meditation, listening to teachings at the foot of my guru, and perhaps doing long hours of service like sweeping floors or preparing food. They would NOT imagine tank tops, spandex pants, water bottles, and electronic music playing through speakers. So it leads to the question: if people in the country where yoga comes from wouldn’t recognize what we’re teaching as yoga, is it really yoga? Or is it what we’ve learned from other westerners is yoga? Are we really teaching yoga at all? Arguably we’re teaching a decontextualized version of Hatha Yoga specifically, that has been heavily influenced by Western expectations of strength and agility. But even calling what we’re teaching Hatha Yoga is problematic, since it reflects a very small slice of yoga practice historically and was done in a very specific context.
Can you imagine what it might be like for a South Asian person to go into a western yoga class thinking that they were going to enjoy a spiritually liberating practice that would reconnect them to their ancestral heritage, and ending up in another reality altogether? I’m not saying this is every South Asian person’s experience, it isn’t. But how might it feel when the white person at the front of the room says explicitly or implicitly, “I’m teaching yoga, let me tell you what yoga is and what it isn’t,” and then proceeds to butcher the Sanskrit language in every other word? It’s painful and harmful to have your spiritual practice stripped, repackaged, and then sold back to you by folks who look a lot like the people who colonized and repressed yoga in the country your family came from. As white folks we need to carefully reexamine our role as yoga teachers and not be so quick to label ourselves as qualified to teach and innovate within this ancient practice. Or maybe we could consider calling what we’re teaching something else entirely and then innovate to our heart’s content. But the article is really about being open to the question and exploration. Thanks for engaging with it here.
